Position in chronology
URU-KA-gina 31add (FAOS 05/1, Ukg 31)
Translation — scholar edition
ETCSRI(1) Guards of the city wall: Ur-Ningublaga, the captain is Šul-barag. Iri-kagina, king of Lagaš. Fifth (year).
Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions — scholar edition (Vienna).
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Why it matters
Names the captain of Lagaš's city-wall guard in Iri-kagina's fifth regnal year, supplying a rare dated administrative snapshot of urban military organisation in the Early Dynastic III period.
Scholarly note
Sumerian royal inscription, published in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions (ETCSRI) by Gábor Zólyomi and collaborators. Translation reproduced from the ETCSRI edition. ORACC text Q001147.
Attribution
Image: CBL CT 003 (Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, Ireland) — from Girsu (mod. Tello) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P222633). source
Translation excerpted from Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions (ETCSRI), University of Vienna, edited by Gábor Zólyomi et al. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/etcsri/Q001147/.
Related tablets
Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
An early witness to systematic administrative notation at Kish. Its signs and numerals can be catalogued, but that does not establish a full translation or prove that it is the world's first writing.
An early surviving historical monument that joins named rulers, a territorial dispute and religious oaths. It shows how a city-state turned victory into a lasting public claim, without establishing that this was the first recorded conflict.